My corn came in weird this year. It tasseled but never developed any ears. I gave it up. After the emotional wreck I was in the first time I lost my corn, you would think it would have bothered me more. Instead, I was almost optimistic.

“Oh well. There’s always next year,” I thought and went on to weeding my tomatoes.

That is the one great thing in gardening. No matter the challenge, there is always next year.

And sometimes there are friends willling to share their bounty this year.

And let me tell you, preparing that much corn for freezing is as much work as weeding it, but somehow it isn’t nearly as exasperating.

Continued from Defeat in the Garden and really, hope tastes sweeter when you remember where it brought you from.

I storm into the house.

“I can’t do this. It’s too much.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The beans are being devoured. The corn is dying under the clover. The strawberries, the onions . . . everything. Everything I touch dies.”

“That’s not true,” my husband objects.

“Really?” I respond, almost daring him to tell me otherwise.

When I decided to put in a garden this year, I knew it would be difficult. Mattias spent a lot of time with me down there, playing in the grass, playing in his car, toddling behind me trying to keep up. The kind of childhood I wanted to give my children was closely tied to the garden, the animals, the chores. My hopes and dreams and memories were all planted somewhere in that soil, and I knew working it over would be hard.

But I didn’t know that it would be this hard. When I decided to go ahead with the garden, I didn’t know that a wilted peace lilly would have me sobbing in my room that I couldn’t keep anything alive. I didn’t know that a dog breaking through a fence and herding my duckllings to death would have me on my knees crying that that the whole world was against me. I didn’t know that every failure, every disappointment, every setback would connect itself to the death of my son.

I didn’t know that I would lose the ability to see past the weeds to the harvest.

“Would it help if we got you a little mini-tiller?” He asked as he came out to put the deck back on the mower.

Part of me wants to scream at him. I’m crying out of a broken heart and he’s worried about the weeds. But I’m calmer now, and I know better than to let that part of me have its say.

“Yes. I’d have to measure out different row spaces, but yes.”

And I go down to the garden and mow under the weeds in the section of garden still left unplanted. I mow under my beans. And halfway through mowing under my corn, I notice my potatoes are flowering.

Flowering potato plants means the first new potatoes of the season. It also means the first potatoes I have ever grown. I can’t resist poking around under the straw for just one.

One potato, steamed, salted, peppered and shared six ways. One potato with a skin so tender, you could scrub it off.

“I could get used to potatoes tasting like something,” I announce.

One potato that has me figuring how many I would need to plant to be able to harvest new potatoes every year. My thoughts begin to turn away from my feelings of failure.

I have already gotten five pounds of snow peas out of the garden and plan on more for a fall crop. I still have strawberries, canteloupe, luffa, pumpkin, zucchini and butternut squash going strong.  I have tomatoes and peppers yet to go in. Even without the corn and beans, this garden shouldn’t be a total waste.

And the beans I can replant.

One potato allowing me to see past the weeds clouding my vision to the harvest.

And would you believe that by the time we get the tiller, my mowed over corn takes off and is showing every sign of being able to outpace the weeds?

And the beans I can replant.

Kneeling next to my onion patch, overwhelmed, fighting back tears, struggling to pull vineweed without pulling out the tender onions that are being strangled. Every morning I’m out here trying to rescue my onions and every morning the weeds have grown back thicker.

I want to give up.

But something deep inside me says this isn’t about onions or weeds. And that walking away will mean more than losing my onions. So I kneel at the edge of the patch between my onions and my potatoes and cry.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

“Why is this so hard?”

I know where these thoughts are leading me, and I try to keep my head down. Try to focus on what I’m doing right now. It’s only onions. It’s only weeds.

But I do look up. I look up to the corn that has been overwhelmed by grass. I had read something about tilling well, planting thick and not worrying too much about the weeds because the corn will shade them out soon enough. It wasn’t working. The clover had grown in so thick it was shading out the little stalks and they were so thin and weak from lack of sun, I was having difficulty telling them apart from the grass.

They were planted too thick to weed with a hoe. I had a vague notion that if I could pull the weeds back a little, the corn would take off and all the work we had put in to planting it would not have been for nothing.

I crawl forward, leaving my onions for the corn. I look for the first corn plant so I can find the row and begin pulling the weeds back. Only I can’t find it. From one morning to the next, the weeds have grown in so thick I can’t tell where I worked only yesterday.

I collapse there between my onions and my corn, screaming at the weeds. Screaming at life. And then I give up.

“I’m done,”

I say to my garden as I walk straight through the corn. Straight through the beans. Straight to the gate with no care for what I trample.

I walk in the garage to get the mower. The keets and chicks scatter in their brooder as I fling open the door. I look at them and try to remember how it was when they were but a plan on paper, a part of my Master Plan. But I can’t. All I see is their little bodies scattered about the property. Like the geese. The ducks. The chickens. The ducklings.

I feel my jaw set, my heart harden as I prepare the mower for what I’m about to do.

I think about my Master Plan and wonder why I ever thought I could do this. Of all the things I’ve lost since Mattias’ death, the hardest has been the future. I used to look forward to life. To the adventure of the everyday. I wasn’t just the-glass-is-half-full type. You could give me an empty glass and I would look forward to all the things I could someday fill it with.

But now it doesn’t matter what’s in the glass nor how full it is. If I think about it too much, it all tastes bitter.

To be continued . . . and I promise this has a happy ending . . .

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And for more gardening posts, visit Smockity’s linky!

The rain the weatherman predicted never came, but Friday dawned bright and beautiful and warm just like he said it would. A perfect day for planting my snow peas and for a couple of before pictures in the garden.

This is our squash garden, waiting oh so patiently. My husband picked up several used cattle panels, bent them at the ends and used PVC to support them in the middle. We’re going to stake down the ends as well. I’m going to plant my salad garden under the panels. By the time the squash is large enough to shade out the lettuce, it will be about time for my lettuce and spinach to bolt, anyway.

For the peas and tomatoes, we’re making a hedge-type support system with used cattle panels. Using my trusty warren how, I ran a nice furrow along the base of the fencing to drop the peas in. I’d like two more by tomato planting time, but for now the “make do” side of me is thinking about planting the tomatoes down the center of the row. By the time they are big enough to need the support, the peas should be dying back, anyway.

I actually felt sort of sad turning under so much of my clover already, but was happy to see it  had a nice dense root system, doing the main job we were looking for in a cover crop this year: pushing out the weeds.

Bear saw I was working in the garden and came down to chat.

“Can I help?” he asked.

Warmed my soul. The children were disappointed in the morning when I told them they couldn’t plant their sections until I had a way of marking off their squares, but they seemed to get over it as soon as they had the day and the sunshine to themselves.

But a voluntary helper? Makes me feel like we’ve done something right in this outdoour country lifestyle we’ve chosen.

“Don’t forget to leave some peas for me!” He interjected as I poured out the last of the package in my hand.

“Sweetheart, I still have two more packages. I should have enough for a fall planting and still have plenty for you guys.”

He smiled. He really likes gardening, and it always surprises me how hard he is willing to work. He can throw a temper tantrum over picking up a few legos, but out here he will work until his muscles are sore. I don’t know if it is the sun or the soil or the warm spring air, but it just feels right. Like this is how we are meant to live and how children are meant to be raised.

Hard work, free time and the great outdoors. For a fleeting moment, I feel just a twinge of the excitement I had when we moved here.

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Visit Smockity Frocks for more frugal gardening and Linda’s Lunacy for more Saturday on the Farm posts and to share your own!

I sit at the corner of the garden, fighting back tears as the world seems to come crashing in. I can’t cope, I’m overwhelmed and I can’t even think straight. My soul cries out the words I no longer say aloud, but are no less a part of every thing I do and every decision I make.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

“I can’t do this.”

“I’m done.”

“I give up.”

“I don’t know how to do this.”

That thought — that I don’t know how to do this — haunts me, and is how I know that I am not crying because my son went up a tree when I called rather than coming to help. Nor am I crying over the argument that ensued when I told my daughter to stop hammering boards together because her father needed to be involved in the building of a new chicken pen. Nor over the time spent looking for the clover seed I wanted to spread as a cover crop. Nor over the dog food that L.E. dumped in the bathtub while I was looking for the seed. Nor even over the missing duck I fear may have met the same fate as the one whose mutilated body we found only yesterday.

“I  don’t know how to do this.”

It was the first intelligible thing I said after the surgeon informed us they were not able to save our son.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

I repeated it over and over with each impossible decision we were asked to make leading up to his funeral.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

It haunts my thoughts whenever grief tears at my soul. I don’t know how to do this. But I do know that if I sit here long enough, the intensity of the feeling will pass. And it does.

The pressure on my chest releases and I can breathe. The tears subside before they even make much of an appearance, and my thoughts turn to the goose standing before me, looking over me with his blue eye. He honks and for a moment I worry that he might bite me as I sit there looking at him at his own level.

“Honk!”

But I know better. He waddles over, nibbles at my jeans, nibbles at my shirt, nibbles at my hair.

“Does it hurt, mom?”

My daughter asks.

“No, it actually kind of tickles.”

My son comes over and we get up off the ground. I explain what we’re about to do and they almost seem to enjoy the work of cultivating and planting all 3,000 square feet of the garden as we talk about cover crops and what they do for the soil. I find my stride, scraping the hoe back and forth in time with my step as I cover the seed my son is broadcasting along my daughter’s furrows. Push the hoe, pull the hoe, step; push, pull, step; scrape, scrape, step. The rhythm feels good. The motion feels good. Even the soreness of my muscles feels good as the light exercise releases the tension.

A brief interruption. Commotion down by the barn. Bug runs out screaming. I can’t understand her, but she’s clearly excited. A few moments later, she is followed by wild flapping and Faithful herding the missing duck out of the barn and back to its flock.

I smile. This day is not going to be lost. My plans for this garden are not going to be lost. Dare I even go so far as to say that though they have been deeply shaken, the dreams we have had for our family here on this land are not completely lost?

Because this much I do know how to do:  scrape, scrape, step; scrape, scrape, step; scrape, scrape, step; stretch and do it again.

“To lose a child involves the loss of hopes and dreams,” the lady on the video said. So many people don’t understand the tears behind the joyous events in the lives of friends and family. That birthdays and graduations and weddings can hurt. That the passage of time makes it easier, but it doesn’t make it all better. Fewer people would probably understand how much I have dreaded gardening this year. But you see, gardening was the first activity of spring I was really looking forward to.

I was really looking forward to it because last year, Mattias was only one. He was only one and his love for the outdoors was so clear. He spent hours down by the garden, sitting in his toy car, watching me work. He spent hours filling his little wheelbarrow with rocks and pushing it along behind me. He spent hours digging in the dirt with whatever garden tools I let him use. And he spent hours racing around and around the property with his little lawnmower clicking all the way.

But this year, he would have been two. This year, he would have understood more. This year, he would have helped more. This year, he was to have his own little garden square to tend to, just like his big brother and his big sisters.

But this year, he isn’t here. And none of my plans for corn and tomatoes and growing potatoes under straw seem to matter all that much.

Thus, it was with rather mixed feelings that I greeted John and the tiller he rented in town. It felt good to be readying the garden on schedule. It felt good to be out in the fresh air and sunshine. It felt good to sink into the freshly tilled soil and feel how much the soil has improved in only one year of caring for it.

It felt good, but it was a goodness I could only take in doses.

On the way to the garage for a rake, however, I heard the familiar “click click click” of his toy lawnmower. I turned to find L.E. pushing it up the hill behind me.

“Are you mowing the lawn?” I asked.

“It’s Tiggy’s,” she answered shyly.

“Yes, Tiggy loved his lawnmower, didn’t he?”

“It is alright if I play with Tiggy’s lawnmower?”

“Sweetheart, Tiggy would love for you to play with his lawnmower.”

Her face beamed at the encouragement and she ran down to the garden, pushing the mower as fast as it could click. I followed, a little more reflective. Leaning on the fence, I watched her copy her father as he tilled the last stretch of the garden.

I smelled the freshly turned soil, felt the light breeze, listened to the roar of the tiller and thought about how “Tiggy would love this day” as my little Bug is fond of saying.

He would have loved this day; it was a day worth loving. Through my sorrow, I saw life and comfort and joy. I loved this day. Even with an aching heart, I loved this day and the memories our family planted together in the rich soil of a peaceful day.

Gardening season has finally arrived to those of us who make the yearly attempt at starting indoors from seed in order to grow those sun loving vegetables we could not otherwise hope to grow in between winters here in zones five and below. And I finally finished a project I started “before.”

My gardening calendar for the year, free for your use and free to share:

It is intended for zone five and is figured based on a last frost date of May 9 and a first frost date of September 30. If your frost date is different, add or subtract the difference for the planting dates. With the succession planting (and decent weather), it should have you harvesting your first salad greens of the season around your last frost date and the last of your cool weather crops near the end of October. Throw in some protection like a simple cold frame, and you may be able to extend that into November.

If you would like to add a little more formal education to gardening with your children, you may enjoy Developing Christian Character Through Gardening, an e-book I wrote a few years ago when we built our raised garden beds.

Some notes:

I have most crops going in every two weeks in order to extend the growing season as much as possible and to keep fresh vegetables coming in all season.

The planting dates that fall on Monday were figured off of the last frost date for spring in our area.

The planting dates that fall on Thursdays were figured off the first frost date for fall in our area.

The harvest information is just to give you a general idea of when you might expect those crops to begin to ripen. A lot will depend on your specific cultivar as well as the conditions specific to your garden.

Also, I did not finish this project in the best mental state.  Concentration isn’t my strong suit just now, anyway, but Mattias spent so much time in the garden with me, it was hard not to see him out there in his little car while I looked up planting dates and counted weeks to harvest. That’s just to say you might want to proofread a little before trusting my calendar completely.

Let me know if you find any errors and Happy Gardening!

It’s the middle of the night after a long trip and my husband hands me a pile of mail. I’m not quite sure what to do with it all. It was a difficult drive and I don’t really know how to just come in and put the children to bed. So I sort the mail.

One pile for sympathy cards. My husband usually opens those. We read them together, but I can’t always handle more than a couple at a time.

One pile for medical bills. There’s almost enough in that pile to buy our house all over and it isn’t even all that we know are coming. I’m thankful for good insurance but can’t bring myself to look just then.

And then there are the seed catalogs.

I had been looking forward to these. I do every year. Garden planning, I’ve found, is my favorite part of gardening. I get to plant all my vegetable dreams on paper and there they never succumb to wind or rain or drought or weeds. My garden is already planned, but I can usually be enticed to squeeze in a few more things.

This year, it isn’t in me. The only thing I can think about is how Tiggy used to sit in his car down by the garden while I was working. Sometimes he toddled behind me. Sometimes he wandered about in the tall grass outside the garden. Always he shouted gleefully any time the chickens came over to work over the compost pile.

“Chickie Chickie!”

I’ve lost my little country boy. My little chore helper who was happiest at my side trying so hard to do whatever I was doing.

Tiggy following Bug down to the garden where Mommy is

I think about how I had to take my garden plan off the bulletin board because Tiggy wouldn’t stop tearing my paper vegetables out of their paper beds. Sighing, I shove them out of the way. They’ve suddenly become another chore, another thing to just get through.

But morning brings a new day. I’m seeking distraction, something to occupy my mind. So I pull the catalogs back out, dig up my garden plan, find a notebook and begin slowly working my way through. One has a sweet potato cultivar advertised for northern gardens. I make a little room in my plans. One has the luffa squash I had given up finding. One even has lignonberry which I’ve been wanting for the hill over the root cellar.

My daughter interrupts, pushing a Hello Kitty notebook between me and a catalog.

“I’m writing a story, Mommy.”

I notice her name written at the top of the page while she chatters on. I nod my head and return to the catalog. But she’s insistent. She pushes her notebook back at me along with a pen. I’m supposed to take dictation. I don’t want to take dictation. I just want to sit here and forget about everything else.

But this is the notebook my little Bug has been working through her own grief in.

Here, she drew Hello Kitty with tears streaming down her face, even while she continued smiling and giggling as if nothing had ever happened.

“Why is Hello Kitty crying?” I had asked her.

“She’s sad that Tiggy died. Too sad to talk anymore.”

So I drag my thoughts back to the present, back to my children, back to where my family is in this moment. Everything is so heavy. The catalogs I set aside, her notebook, the pen. Their weight is almost unbearable as I take the little notebook and sit up to write her story.

“I am happy,” she begins.

The words sting. She does seem happy. She is very much the same as she was before the accident. Except I know that Hello Kitty cries. And that Hello Kitty doesn’t talk any more. I want to help her, but I don’t know how. She continues her story.

“I wish Tiggy didn’t die. Mommy and Daddy are so sad. We are a happy family.”

I pause for a moment over her last sentence. I look up at her bright, hopeful eyes. Smiling, I finish writing and hand back her story and she skips off to show Daddy.

I keep smiling. Her words touch my very soul. I like that thought. That we can be so sad, but still be a happy, nurturing family where our children can grow and find happiness.

And as I take up my catalogs, they aren’t quite so heavy anymore.

If I come across one more website telling me that brassicas are delicious, hardy and easy to grow, I am going to scream. Seriously. After losing everything I’ve ever planted from that entire family to the homely little cabbage moth year after year, I decided I’m done with them. They aren’t worth the trouble.

Now, if I actually got any, maybe they would be worth the trouble. But I never have. Not a single lowly broccoli. Not a single leaf of cabbage. Not a single little Bruusels sprout, the most exotic thing I’ve ever tried to grow.

Did I ever tell you about my last fight with the cabbage moth? Well, war, more like. I decided to give the worst – of – all vegetable – families one last shot in my garden. In some strange fit of fancy, I decided all that stood between me and garden fresh broccoli was a little more determination. I’d start the crop earlier, giving it a head start before the cabbage moth really got going. I’d look over my plantings more frequently, looking for eggs and worms. I’d win the battle and I’d do it without spraying.

Every time I saw a cabbage moth, the kids and I would run out to the garden with a butterfly net and feed the little pest to my son’s frog. Every day I’d go over the leaves of my plants, but all I found at first were holes. It wasn’t until my broccoli was reduced to free-standing veins that I found my first worm. I gradually got more adept at spotting worms and eggs, but you know what? I’d scrape away three eggs in the morning only to find them replaced by nine more in the afternoon.

And still the holes grew larger and the leaves grew fewer.

I started running the chickens through the garden a couple times a day, hoping they’d spot the worms I missed. What did it matter if they took a few nips themselves as payment for their services? In the end, I penned them over the only remaining cabbages I had with the vain notion that I’d rather lose my cabbage crop to my chickens than to cabbage moths. Which I subsequently did. But at least they gave me eggs in return. Then I vowed never to plant anything in the brassica family ever again so long as we both shall live.

Brassicas may be delicious, but they are not hardy and easy to grow. At least not for me.

So now I’m sitting here looking over my finished garden plan for the spring . . . the one I mapped out on graph paper with each little square representing one actual square foot in my garden that is already too large for me to manage alone . . . and wondering. What on earth was I thinking when I devoted exactly sixty square feet to brassicas?

Is it a simple case of gardener’s amnesia? Or is it that I somehow don’t feel I can really call myself a gardener until I’ve managed to bring to my table one of the most common of vegetables in American gardens? Granted I’m planning on building a box covered in a cloth to keep the insects off the plants without my constant intervention, but I am not so naive as to think that will actually work.

After all, I’m not so sure the cabbage moths around here aren’t equipped with gnawing teeth and digging claws. Their offspring certainly do judging by the holes they make in my cabbages long before they’re big enough to even see.

Now please tell me I’m not the only one. Even if by some miracle you find brassicas possible to grow (I’m not willing to entertain the notion of  “easy”), certainly you must have some garden nemesis, whether it be squash vine borer, Japanese beetle, cutworm or some other cropivore?

Please?

Sitting on the porch with the children, we watched the combine work the corn field across the road. They love the roar of the heavy machinery and Bear literally danced with anticipation as the combine approached the grain truck. He jumped and squealed and clapped as they pulled alongside one another and we got to watch the grain pour into the back of the truck.

“This is what it’s all about,” I thought to myself. The season was coming to a close. A season of work, of worry, of challenges. This year’s crop had to face a late freeze that took out the majority of the beet crop, flooding that put counties under water, grasshoppers that left farmers in four Nebraska counties eligible for federal aid and mold and fungus issues as fields slowly dried after the flooding.

Mr. B. had stopped by the week before to chat. Standing in the drive, he affirmed that his crop had escaped the worst Nebraska’s finicky weather had to offer this year and he was pleased with the dry spell that was reducing the moisture content of his corn and readying it for harvest.

“Another weekend of this and it should be around 18%,” he said with an appreciative glance over his field. I knew he was talking about the moisture content, deduced that 18% was worthy of something but unsure exactly what that meant. But since the harvesters were out less than a week later, it must have marked the end of the season.

Now the fields stand empty. Strands of electric fencing have been erected around some of the harvested fields where cattle have been turned out to glean. We cannot see them from our property, but I love listening to them lowing in the fields late at night. Our ducks and geese have discovered the fallen corn and spend their days waddling up and down the rows, cleaning up the spillage.

And I think of my own garden. My own disappointing garden. I’d had high hopes for it, but they seemed destined to be shattered from the start. We got started late, so most of my plans were never planted let alone realized. This left a frighteningly large portion of the garden open to weeds who were more then happy to fill in the vacuum. Then my goslings, who were supposed to be my assistants in the garden, escaped their pen and ate a quarter of my corn. Without decent fencing, I was forced to take them off the garden until the plants matured.

But I jumped the gun on that. Or didn’t realize just how big they were getting and how small my heritage corn was. Now, the corn could have easily withstood the occasional nip to the leaves. But the geese seemed to favor the developing tassles on the corn itself and before I even realized what was happening, they rendered my entire planting incapable of pollinating.

Hail took out my tomatoes and peppers. Weeds overwhelmed my cucumbers, squash and melons. Not to mention me. When we finally gave up on the garden for the season, it had yielded three pounds of green beans, three cucumbers and two pie pumpkins. All wonderfully delicious, but a depressing harvest from a 3,000 square foot garden that was supposed to keep us in garden fresh veggies throughout the growing season and perhaps even overwhelm us with its bounty.

As it was, we got way more out of the unexpected fruits the property offered without our labor and finances. Lilac jelly, black locust blossom fritters and syrup, clover jelly, dandelion syrup, and sharab el toot. We even discovered an elderberry bush, sampled some berries and determined it worthy of propogating next year. Of course, once I add my gardening skills to that poor bush, it will likely go the way of my garden, but one can dream.

Looking over the fence at my tattered rows of strawberries, my cold frame of arugula and the rows that never were, I wonder for a moment what next year will bring. But here’s the strange thing about gardening: No matter how bad this year was, there is always next year.

No matter how disappointing every year has been, there is always next year.

Experience is not much of a teacher when it comes to gardening.

Next year’s weeds have not yet sprouted. Next year’s storms not yet brewed. Next year’s heat not yet driven me inside to lemonade and a fan. Instead, I have a calendar full of optimism where seeds are planted in succession and my harvest comes in just a little faster than I can bring it all in.

Whether I’m an incurable optimist or merely suffer that bizarre form of amnesia common to many gardeners I cannot tell. But next year will be better.

It certainly couldn’t be much worse.